Hunahpu and Xbalanque

The twins' story begins with a skull. Their father, Hun Hunahpu, was killed by the lords of Xibalba and his head hung in a calabash tree, where it spat into the palm of the underworld maiden Xquic and made her pregnant. She fled to the surface, to the grandmother Xmucane, and bore Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Bullied by their elder half-brothers, the boys grew up hunting with blowguns that never missed.

On the earth they shot down Seven Macaw, the boastful false sun, and disposed of his two giant sons; they lured their cruel half-brothers up a tree and turned them into monkeys; and, tipped off by a rat, they recovered their father's ballgame gear from the rafters where the grandmother had hidden it. The thud of the rubber ball rang through the floor of the world, and Xibalba sent its owl messengers with the customary summons.

Unlike their father, the twins came prepared. They sent a mosquito ahead to bite each death lord and harvest their names; they ignored the wooden mannequins and the red-hot stone bench; in the House of Darkness they tipped their cigars with fireflies and passed off a macaw's scarlet tail as a burning torch, returning everything intact. Razor House, Cold House, Jaguar House, Fire House all failed to kill them. Only in the House of Bats did they slip: Hunahpu peered out to check for dawn and the great bat Camazotz snatched his head away to hang as the game ball. Xbalanque summoned the animals, carved a substitute head from a squash the coati brought, and stationed a rabbit by the court to bounce away like a stray ball while he swapped the real head back.

The endgame was a feint. Knowing the stone oven was a trap, the twins leapt into the fire; their ground bones, thrown in the river, brought them back on the fifth day. They returned disguised as vagabond dancers whose miracles - houses burned and restored, victims sacrificed and revived - so enthralled the lords that One Death and Seven Death begged to be sacrificed themselves. The twins obliged and did not bring them back. Xibalba was broken. The Popol Vuh says the brothers then rose into the sky, one as the sun, the other as the moon. The "Headband Twins" of Classic Maya vases - one spotted with death marks, the other patched with jaguar skin - are read by scholars as their portraits a thousand years earlier.